Harry Markopolos, the now famous whistle blower who attempted to blow the cover on the Madoff ponzi scheme, testified before Congress today. I tried to find the actual transcript of the testimony after hearing about it from some people at work, but no dice. One summary was found here.
Some gems from the actual testimony include:
"Right now, the SEC is 3,500 chickens; we need to put some foxes in there."
"I plan on turning in a one-billion-dollar mini-Madoff to the SEC tomorrow." "I hope they will listen to me this time."
"If you flew the entire SEC staff to Fenway Park, they wouldn't be able to find first base."
From his prepared remarks (also a good read) you will find this one:
The biggest, most glaring tip-off that this had to be fraud was that BM only reported 3 down months out of 87 months whereas the S&P 500 was down 28 months during that time period. No money manager is only down 3.4% of the time. That would be equivalent to a major league baseball player batting .966 and no one suspecting that this player was cheating, and therefore fictional.
But the real kicker is how much money is $50 billion. I know CNN ran an article talking about how much a trillion dollars is, but this amount of money is just as staggering. If you spent $50/hour for 2009 years, you would still not go through one billion dollars. To blow through $50 billion in that same amount of time, you would need to spend $2839.15/hour. This is a ton of money. Which makes these comments all the more comical.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Fun with Madoff
Sunday, February 01, 2009
The Superbowl ads were super bad, but one online was pretty funny
For what turned out to be a great Superbowl game, the ads certainly were much more of a let down. I figured with the economy tanking there may be some funny ones that played on bailouts and what not, but they were plain terrible. If you missed them, Hulu has them online. I can't imagine how USA today will rank them tomorrow, but my overall impression is that they must have laid off the creative staff in some of these ad agencies. The Doritos and Cheetos ones were pretty funny though, and I laughed when that ostrich chased the mailman. The David Abernathy one was terrible.
In looking around for some of them on the internet this morning, I came across one that is so stupid that it actually works. It could use some work, but the concept would have worked for the Superbowl - people would have talked about this commercial, and they would have remembered it. Take a look at Coors 2nd Life Superbowl Commercial. Disagree or not, it's better than these Clydesdale commercials, which need to go the way of the frogs.
